Of course, Keystone XL won’t be a pipeline TO the USA. It’s a pipeline THROUGH the USA to overseas export. It’s likely to cause a gasoline price hike in this country. What do we get from this pipeline? More groundwater pollution, and more climate change.

President Obama could stop this pipeline all by himself. The right-wing is clearly worried, and the Faux News crowd is even claiming that Keystone XL approval would be the answer to the crisis in the Ukraine!

It’s never going to be a perfect world, but I object to this new policy at OneUtah to comment on two, three, or four different tiers as KOS does. I understand that you can reply to a commenter directly, but you can do that by addressing her/him. in the same way, by simply stating their name at the top of your comment.

Richard:

You have often called for a progression of events in order to prove or disprove a theory. Who has the time to search out the dates that comments were given?

Currently the nation of Germany is in possession on their soil of 40% of all solar panels on Earth. They are more than committed, yet solar currently provides 2% of their power needs.

As they ready to close down their nuclear plants they plan to burn coal using modern sequestering plants, ironically made in Japan, the nation now suffering unprecedented radioactive contamination from failed nuclear plants.

As far as the Keystone issue stands catch a clue, either we burn that tar/oil sand fuel in a more efficient way than many, or the Canadians are absolutely willing and committed to ram/thrash a pipeline over pristine mountain areas of Alberta and British Columbia in order to facilitate supertanker pickup to sell the oil to China. By God let me tell you if you doubt they will, you are woefully uninformed. When it comes to commodity infrastructure projects the Canadians know how to commit GRAND scale environmental crimes with a minimum amount of investment and human capital. Really no equals on Earth.

So you sell the oil to conscientious American’s who may bitch about how it is done…or sell it to the conscienceless Chinese who will burn the heck out of it until their air quality is so bad, they run out of medical masks in the entire nation. I mean medical dust masks, aren’t those MADE in China by now.

Be realistic, the entirety of North Dakota oil and the mass finds north in Saskatchewan are going to use the Keystone pipeline. In order to understand the magnitude of this reserves of oil and gas in Saskatchewan are VAST, yet as yet underdeveloped the Province wisely waiting to see how things turn out in Alberta, and a different set of laws to ensure the Province gets a proper share of the money. That, Alberta, North Dakota, South Dakota all will feed the pipeline.

Here or China, with all the perils of zero responsibility, based on actual and cultural desperation. Great.

Germany’s electricity prices are currently 300% of Utah’s prices. Have you shown up to a Public Service Commission meeting yet to say that you want 300% higher electricity prices? Can you name one person who has? Ever?

You seem genuinely surprised that there is data out there. You also seem shocked to discover that some things have costs. You seem to live in a world where all there are are your feelings and that’s all is need is for you to feel things. Have you ever built a power plant? I have. Have you ever financed a power plant? I have. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about but yet you have feelings and a tool lack of any substance and data. Please stop humiliating yourself and go read a few books and get back to me when you are willing to have a grown up conversation based on something other than your feelings.

I think this guy’s estimates are the cheapest option for Utah (RMP = Rocky Mountain Power, which has a lottery for subsidizing home solar installations). Can you make me a better deal?

You can probably get a 3 kW system for your home for around $15,000. The RMP incentive would be around $3,000 if you can win the lottery, and Utah gives a maximum $2,000 tax credit. That system would save you about $500 per year on your electricity, making your pay-back period about 20 years.

So you earlier linked and were making the case that solar power was competitive without incentives. Then you say for you it is too expensive. Then you quote a guy who makes the case for incentives from the state (paid for by other taxpayers) and RMP (paid for by ratepayers). So if if solar is competitive with conventional without 2 layers of incentives then why don’t you do it and why do you quote someone telling you about the math of incentives (paid for by someone else)?

Solar prices are about to go higher because your government is about to slap a tariff on imported panels to protect Obama’s bundlers to replace the old import tariff which is expiring. Import tariffs making panels more expensive reduces the amount of panels installed and kills the planet. You can thank your government and your President for that.

The first question with your house is do you have a clear unobstructed southern exposure? no trees, neighbors trees, etc? do you have a south facing roof? how old is your roof? what angle is your roof? (ideal roof slope would be about 40 degrees). What is your roof made of?

The best way to benefit from solar is not to buy or lease. The best was is to have a PPA. So you don’t buy the panels, you don’t pay to lease the panels. You only buy the power generated at a discount. So the panel company sells you power at $0.09/kWh so you know that you are always saving money no matter what and you are not out of pocket for the panels themselves. The incentives are their problem and not yours.

President Obama is our President, whether we voted for him or not. I didn’t, but as they say we have one President at a time so I’m dealing with it.

I believe I linked above to what you call a PPA, which Best Buy is offering in California, Arizona, New York and Oregon. According to the article, it’s the first time this arrangement has been made available to homeowners. If they add Utah to the list, I’ll definitely give it due consideration because it seems like a good deal.

There is a big difference between a lease and a PPA. The fact that think regress conflates the two is not surprising. 22 year olds with degrees in gender studies tend not to have a firm grasp on finance, math, energy, etc. So this is a pretty poor article that is confusing to anyone who knows what they are talking about.

I was at my parents home in Calif over Christmas and while I was there a door to door salesman knocked on their door selling solar PPAs. I talked to them for about an hour about how did they qualify homes to qualify. This is what they told me:
1. Must have no obstructions such as trees, neighbors trees, neighbor’s house or anything else in the way on the southern exposure.
2. Must have newish roof.
3. Only certain roof materials work (not shake, for example)
4. Must have south sloping roof

Then you sign a contract for some period of time to buy all the power your roof generates for something like 20 years at something like 14 cents per kWh. So if your normal cost is 16 cents, then it works. If your normal cost is 10 cents then it doesn’t work. Let me make this clear, you must be offsetting expensive power and not cheap power. Utah has cheap power. This will not work in Utah unless Utah gets 16 cent power like in Calif. It could work with additional subsidies which you keep telling me that solar doesn’t need. So yes, it is a good deal, if and only if your normal power is expensive.

Buying power is not a lease. A lease is a lease of a system and you get all the power from that system. Buying power under a PPA is not leasing. You don’t lease a taxi. You pay for the ride. The 22 year olds with degrees in gender studies still have their parents paying for their internships while their parents work hard and their kids badmouth the very means and system which allows them to write tripe for think regress don’t know the difference.

Well, if this sort of arrangement comes to Utah they won’t be charging more for electricity than the power company. Even if you don’t pay for the solar panels and installation yourself, it’s an inconvenience and some might object to the aesthetics of solar (I don’t).

The won’t charge more than RMP and they won’t charge less than they need to make money. So below some price it won’t exist at all. You just don’t need an arrangement for it to work, you need a price for it to work. Let’s say that break-even price is 12 cents per kWh. Then they exist at 14 cents and don’t exist at 10 cents. Comprende?

I don’t have any problem with the aesthetics. In some parts of Utah there are other problems such as 100mph wind storms (Centerville), snow, dust, shadows, local code, HOAs, etc.

The point of Germany is that their solar efforts are ancillary, and Germany frankly has no other options but spend to buy energy. This drives the German efforts, they must sell value added goods to buy energy that just keeps making them poorer.

If it is unknown to you, German physicists in their climatic analysis of Venus (the atmosphere rife with sulfur dioxide, methane and CO2) learned that the surface and atmospheric temperatures of this “greenhouse” planet are exactly as they anticipated they would be based on their distance from the Sun. This led to them assuming through deduction that greenhouse gases don’t matter too much in affecting a planets temperatures. They are off the CO2 bandwagon and are more concerned with their dependence on nuclear power. Expect Germany in the future to deal less and less with the addled anthropogenic modelers, whose models have failed again and again.

Germany still produces over 50% of it electricity by burning coal, and since they have a large free supply of lignite, modern burners, joined with renewables will be effected. The nuclear plants will be shut down, some 20 I believe. To date they are supplying any shortfall by buying power from hydro plants in Scandinavia, or nuclear power from France 55 plants. Renewables indeed, while the goal is noble, the Germans have seen the limits on return of investment..they’ll most likely keep buying Russian gas and increasing that…which is why in large, obama and his penchant to flip sovereign countries like Ukraine will get no help from Europeans.

Currently Richard, solar power is the most expensive electricity per megawatt on the planet when all is said and done. The only exception are toss out batteries which are the most expensive power per kilowatt.

Nice unfounded assertion you’ve got there. In some areas of the country, solar power is cheaper than buying electricity from the utilities. Even in Utah, solar panels work out about the same as Utah Power bills over the life of the system.

It’s not about me (or you). When it becomes more economical to put up solar panels, you won’t be able to buy a house in Utah without them. That day is coming. If we had smart energy policy in America, we’d be there already.

Again, Germany has a national goal of of producing 35% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050. Why can’t we do that? And talk about job creation…

No, I said it’s cheaper in some areas of the country. The total cost of electricity from solar in Utah is about the same as buying power from Utah Power – over the life of the system. But all things being equal, it’s obviously more affordable to pay monthly bills for 20 years than invest in the up-front costs of installing solar panels.

That’s why we need energy policies that level the playing field for renewable energy. Right now our government is subsidizing fossil fuels and nuclear, which we don’t need.

So according to you “it’s obviously more affordable to pay monthly bills for 20 years than invest in the up-front costs of installing solar panels.” So in other words, you would rather save a few shekels than save the planet. Shame on you for being so pecuniary.

The current amount of solar generated power in Germany is 3% of needs. Advantages to when the Sun shines it is during peak hours of demand, and this gives this solar adjunct a nice kick. Currently the article states that Germany currently has 5 times the MW of PV effected in their country compared to the US.

While all good, it is no answer to current and help us, future energy demands, and we are way behind, obama boondoogles and promises aside.

The link on solar prices is interesting, where it can be done it should be, Utah having natural advantage. It’s so good you all should cough up the 30k for the grid tie and array, and installation per house.

Colorado had a program to pay for 50% of the cost of a home solar system with or without a grid tie, but you needed the money upfront in whatever way, then you could apply for the refund from the state. Over now, started a solar boom in state. Maybe Utah should pick it up and run with it.

Generally the grid tie back to the power grid is going to pay you about half of what the utility charges per kilowatt.

In their recent report The Billionaires’ Carbon Bomb about the Koch Brothers and the Keystone XL pipeline, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) contends that Koch Exploration Canada, the Koch Industries subsidiary that buys and sells land for energy development, could profit by up to $100 billion with the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Of course not, but attacking the source is Richard’s #1 technique. He even attacks sources when I don’t use them. I will use the CBO as a source and he uses the occasion to attack Fox, even though they weren’t mentioned or used be me at all.

Although it is funny that this “report” was written by kids. You’d think they could find some lefty professor somewhere.

And…the financial end of the Koch attempt to rule the world does not seem to have been impacted at all by austerity, war, taxes, penalties, jailings, impacts of right-thinking citizens the world around or their own conscience.

They MUST be right. Despoiling is the future. ..and they OWN it already!

I’ll be out for a few days, so there’ be particularly easy blogging. But just in case the challenges are too great, I’ll leave some “And?s” (short for Ayn Rands) to throw out there should your minds find themselves in captivity.

The provincial government Alberta Energy said Thursday in response to a request that “we confirm that Koch Oil Sands Operating ULC is the Designated Representative of 298 Alberta Crown Oil Sands leases covering approximately 455,000 hectares (1.1 million acres).”

Do you believe anything from Newsmax and Peter Schweizer? I think Alex Jones (of 9/11 conspiracy fame) got on board with this bullshit too. Michael Moore doesn’t own stock, right-wing lies notwithstanding. Even if he did, comparing Moore to the Koch brothers is completely ridiculous.

This old smear is based on a tax return from a foundation Schweizer alleges is controlled fully by Moore. Moore denied this on C-SPAN, with the statement “Michael Moore own Halliburton stock? See, that’s like a great comedy line. I know it’s not true – I mean, I’ve never owned a share of stock in my life. Anybody who knows me knows that, you know – who’s gonna believe that? Just crazy people are going to believe it – crazy people who tune in to the Fox News Channel.”

Where did you get the idea Moore has “millions in corporate stock holdings”? Nobody has ever accused him of that, however falsely.

As it turns out, you can ask any question on MichaelMoore.com and get an answer. Do the Koch brothers have a website where they answer questions from the public?

You can’t recycle the Michael Moore union lie. Already debunked on One Utah!

Cav, please note Richard’s response above. His first instinct is to attack the sources. So you wonder why I do that? I give you Richard Warnick.

Michael Moore admitted that his Family Foundation owned Halliburton stock. So factually it is true and the facts are correct no matter what the source. So the fact that Richard goes after the source, while at the same time using his long list of paid lefty hacks as sources, tells you a lot about the credibility of Richard.

So, let’s all put our trust in the word of ‘Certified Teller of Truth’ (as he, nearly alone) sees it – brewski – before he tries to tag us all with the liar label once more.

As for me, I’m not watching any televised ‘news’ at all these days, and I really don’t suppose any Koch bro’s checks brew might be receiving are scored by how many converts he chalks up here at OneuTah.

We’ve been over this. Putting solar panels on my roof (or brewski’s roof) doesn’t solve the problem. We need to make solar energy affordable for all, and then it will be hard to buy a house in Utah without solar panels.

Here is the issue. We need a national energy policy to solve the problem, individual actions don’t matter. Government subsidies go to fossil fuels and nuclear. Putting up a few solar panels won’t change what must be changed.

The 2009 economic stimulus package promoted by President Obama included $5 billion to weatherize some 607,000 homes—with the goals of both spurring the economy and increasing energy efficiency.

But the project was required to comply with a statute called the Davis-Bacon Act (signed into law by President Hoover in 1931), which provides that construction projects with federal funding must pay workers the “prevailing wage”—basically a union perk that costs taxpayers about 20 percent [or] more than actual labor rates. This requirement comes with a mass of red tape; bureaucrats in the Labor Department must set wages, as a matter of law, for each category of construction worker in each of three thousand counties in America.

There was no schedule for “weatherproofers.” So the Labor Department began a slow trudge of determining how much weatherproofers should be paid in Merced County, California; Monmouth County, New Jersey; and several thousand other counties.

The stimulus plan had projected that California would weatherproof 2,500 homes per month. At the end of 2009, the actual total was 12.

because it doesn’t matter.
If it is the CBO you discredit the source and you blame Faux News.
If it is the NYT you discredit it and blame Faux News.
If it is no one in particular you discredit it and blame Faux News.

By LOUISE RADNOFSKY
June 16, 2011 5:16 p.m. ET
West Virginia’s stimulus-funded weatherization program was riddled with problems including nepotism, poor workmanship and billing errors, Department of Energy investigators have found.

Local agencies in charge of using $38 million in federal funds to insulate the homes of low-income families carried out shoddy work, sent in invoices before they had finished, failed to keep accurate accounting records and gave preferential treatment to employees and relatives who qualified for the program, according to a new audit report by DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.

In the United States, credible estimates of annual fossil fuel subsidies range from $14 billion to $52 billion annually, while even efforts to remove small portions of those subsidies have been defeated in Congress…

Maybe it would make more sense to focus on the tens of billions lavished on the fossil fuels industries and the nuclear power industry, instead of the millions grudgingly doled out for energy conservation and renewable energy.

Same subsides, but, you know, SHIFTED to where they serve the national interest. I admit it’s not as original as your imaginative plan to argue with progressives on the Web until they agree to install solar panels, and eat the cost. Unlike your plan, however, subsidies actually work. And even if all progressive bloggers bought solar panels, that wouldn’t make an appreciable difference.

eat the cost? I thought you told me that solar was just as cost effective as conventional? So there is no eating of any cost. make up your mind. No, I don’t argue with progressives. I mock innumerates.

Let me explain it again, since you didn’t understand this the last two times I explained it.

Total cost of a household solar array in Utah is now cheap enough that it’s equivalent to the cost of power from the grid over the 20-year life of the system. But switching to solar requires an up-front investment of around $30K!

Good luck finding wealthy progressives willing to pay. I haven’t got the money!

All the progressive bloggers in America put together don’t have $52 billion a year to re-make our energy infrastructure, so you’ll have to give up on that plan.

I suggest we take away the subsidies now going to fossil fuels and nuclear, and get busy on conservation and renewables. Thought I made that clear. BTW unlike the Keystone XL pipeline, these projects would mean millions of jobs for Americans.

Didn’t I already say we should end the subsidies? You are arguing with yourself. You want to end oil subsidies but you don’t want to pay for alternative energy subsides. You want it to come from the unicorns.

George Soros, last time I checked, wasn’t a blogger but an investor and philanthropist. You are welcome to tell him he’s responsible for fixing everything that’s wrong with the world, but even a billionaire will tell you that some problems are beyond the scope of individual action.

It was your point that regressives don’t have any money to put solar panels on your roof for you. I gave you a regressive who does. Give him a call. He is one of you and I am sure he will pay you for your panels. Just ask him.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The federal government spent $24 billion on energy subsidies in 2011, with the vast majority going to renewable energy sources, according to a government report.
Renewable energy and energy efficiency accounted for $16 billion of the federal support, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the fossil-fuel industry received $2.5 billion in tax breaks.

Since the sentence says “$2.5 billion in tax breaks” it would be hard for them to “ignore subsidies delivered through the tax code.

Can you read English?

Also, foreign tax credits are not a subsidy of any kind. That is the entire basis of the US tax code for all income earned by anyone overseas. So to list that as a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry is just flaunting your ignorance.

Every source will tell you there are various ways of calculating subsidies, especially the ones that are buried in the tax code. That’s how the CBO report was able to claim that subsidies for renewables are larger than for fossil fuels – which isn’t actually true.

In this case “true” are your uninformed beliefs. You have no idea what the “truth” is and you admit that there are all kinds of ways of measuring it. But you have your beliefs so for you your beliefs are what is “true”. You are mistaking your faith for reality, and lacking evidence all you have is your feelings.